Guide on Choosing a Web Host- written by Charles on 20/09/04

Website Publishing Tips

There are plenty of web hosts out there but choosing a right one is very important. You can choose free web host but it is advisable to start off with a cheap web host to get some hands on experience on some web hosting tools. Since you will be paying for the services, there will not be too much limitation imposed on you as compared to free web host.

Cheap Web Host

Normally for beginners, it is advisable to start up with a cheap web host. Some rough guide of cheap web host might be around the range of US$1-US$2 per month. The price stated is for the cheapest package where the monthly transfer and storage space is very little. The monthly transfer might be somewhere in the range of 1GB per month and the storage space might be in the range of 100MB per month. All the price and package stated above are just a very rough guide as if you do enough research you might be able to find some even cheaper and host more space for you. But there is a catch here, the lesser you pay for a web hosting company the higher the probability that you might be getting lesser support. It really depends a lot on how you do your research.

So Why Choose a Cheap Web Host?

Now the question comes, Why do i need to choose a cheap web host that I might be expecting little support from them? Firstly, you might not be really sure what kind of services (will be discussed more in depth below) you really need. Secondly, although some web hosting companies allow their customer to try out the web hosting control panel before buying, I believe the you really need to try out for some time before you know whether you are comfortable with the control panel. If this control panel does not really suit you, you can always look for another web hosting company with another kind of control panel. The control panel provide a lot of services which include some scripts or even a forum for you to install. The control panel also allows you to create new users or new email accounts, or even allows you to look at your web stats (which is another very important factor which will not be discussed here) and many other features.

Conclusion

All in all, it is advisable to do some research before you subscribe to any web hosting company but eventually you need that gut feeling to choose the right one for yourself. Start out with some cheap host and gradually go for the more expensive one. You do not really have to start with cheap host if you think you know what kind of services you need. Normally i do my research at www.webhostingtalk.com